Because Andrea Smith is a total genius, I took notes when she spoke. Figured some folks on here might be interested in a few key points that jumped out.

-Sexual violence is a logic of domination. Gender justice must thusly be centralized in social justice movements and work.
-Sexual violence is a key strategy that naturalizes other kinds of domination.
-It is dangerous that we have moved towards thinking only people with PhDs and MSWs can lead healing processes, and that we have tried to make survivors buy in as allies to the prison industrial complex and sentencing.
-Studies show half of men would rape someone if they thought they could get away with it.
-Laws put in place have actually led to BATTERERS calling the state/police more often and getting women locked up.
-Restorative justice maintains that transgressions are the result of a community breakdown, but we should be careful to romanticize the notion of community. Communities often don't support or believe that what happened to a survivor is bad.
-The goals we have then should be to build shared community standards of accountability.
-When community approach goes wrong, or when the state is relied on, survivors and their allies are alienated and people are thus less likely to speak up in the future.
-Patriarchy itself relies heavily on a gender binary system.
-We can opt to govern ourselves with interrelatedness. This means radically viewing oneself in relation to others, and caring about the nurturance of those relationships.
-How do you take ideas and operationalize them? Revolution through trial and error. Collectively continue a conversation. What would it mean to start to build the world we want to live in now?
-We need to figure out how to make organizing part of how we already live.
-"Counter culture" - they build the highway for you, you travel around in circles, but they've still created the roads. You did not DESIGN the roads.
-Agencies (sexual assault and domestic violence shelters) should just be SUPPORT orgs for a broad scale anti-violence political organizing MOVEMENT - they are not in and of themselves the movement.
-Capitalism has limited our political imagination.
-Focusing on cultural and artistic work is therefore a central component to any movement for change.


For more information on Andrea, check this out:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Smith_(academic)

She has her PhD in the History of Consciousness, which I find hugely fascinating. As I do her.